Speeding up BOSS Linux Boot / Startup time

Heres a neat tweak i found to get you from GRUB to Gnome login page faster, do note however that this may cause some issues, so try it at your own risk. Its worked for me without any issues so far.

As you boot up you BOSS Linux (or any Linux or Unix OS for that matter) installation, a series of scripts run as a part of the start up process. Scripts are run within a shell. By default on BOSS Linux (and on many other Linux Distributions) bash is the shell that runs these scripts. There are various tweaks to speed up the startup process, this is one of them. We’ll try to get these scripts to run faster. Dash is an alternate shell, its small and runs scripts faster than bash. Theres a catch however I’ll come to it at the end of this post.

To install dash type sudo apt-get install dash on the terminal (remember not to use sudo if you are logged in as root). You can also use Synaptic, you’ll find dash on the list of packages. Once you have installed dash you’ll need to make it the default system shell, how? read on…

/bin/sh is a symbolic link to the default system shell. The default system shell on BOSS Linux is bash. So we’ll have to change it to dash. To do so type:

sudo mv /bin/sh /bin/sh_old

sudo ln -s /bin/dash /bin/sh

on the terminal, remember not to use sudo if you are logged in as the root user. Reboot to see the difference. This shaved off close to 10 seconds from my boot time, I am not saying that it’ll do the same for all of us, but most people who have used dash have noticed boot time go down.

The catch here is that some shell scripts use (incorrectly) specify /bin/sh as the interpreter assuming it points to /bin/bash, these scripts won’t work if you have /bin/sh pointing to /bin/dash. I have not faced any such issues so far but if some scripts act up I know where to look 😉

Ubuntu has been using dash as the default system shell since 6.10. Click here to read about it.